We wish… the good/bad neighbour analogy is very apt here; whatever happens in the USA spills over here all the time.

We are about to enter our own Trump shit show when PP is elected next year.

For me personally, it was all about balance.

15 years ago, Gmail/Inbox was a great email client, the domain was great and popular (so no need to spell it out for people) and I would “pay” by getting ads based on my emails read by a bot.

Now Gmail is a terrible email client, the best updates are ridiculous things like moving buttons around and it takes Google years to roll out. The thing loses emails, mislabels and misclassifies stuff and the rules work for a week then blow up. On top of that, google is now basically a proctologist considering how far up my ass they want to go

The balance is broken… Google now officially sucks (IMO)

Think of it this way…

You take all your money and you have a lawyer form a charity (no tax) that you control. The charity rakes in even more money and all they make (via investment) is tax free (or practically so)

Meanwhile, since you are employed by that charity, it pays for your mansions, trips, fancy foods, vacations, yachts, whatever you want… Basically it is like having a rich daddy that buys everything for you and you never have to worry about money

Because it’s the only path left they have to attain power. They cannot win on merit, debate, ideas, track record, etc… it’s been like that for a while but now they are getting more and more desperate

Pirating implies some knowledge and effort some people may not have or want to get into

Paid Legal services are so enshitified some people may think they are getting ripped up

Paid illegal services are often HUGE bang for buck value (no enshitification, no limits, no nonsense and often better customer service)

bUt ThEy ArE oNlY sElLiNg ThOsE bEcAuSe ThAt Is WhAt We DeMaNd

These apps are so bad they have recorded people “hard braking” when they are home watching TV (just check the Play store for any of them and read the reviews)… there is no way this isn’t ripe for abuse

I was planning to use it to drive one of my TVs, so basically to be an HDTV player.

The Raspbian OS was fine, the Emby client would not start (segmentation fault) and the performance on the web client was not great.

Now on Android, Emby client runs pretty well (better than on the FireTV sticks I am trying to replace) but I could not get Google Play working (yet) which left me without F1TV (the only “other” vid app I care about for now to run on the TV)

I was planning to use it to drive one of my TVs, so basically to be an HDTV player.

The Raspbian OS was fine, the Emby client would not start and the performance on the web client was not great.

In America, the government intervention is whatever corporations pay politicians to say and do… it’s actually worse than pure Capitalism and they managed, through regulatory capture, to turn the government against the people or competition for their paymasters

Got my last Pi (RBP5) to try to set up a simple TV player under linux… unfortunately the performance was shit… had to go with Android and it’s barely OK (bang for buck)

With the IPO I expect RBP are going to become more expensive and significantly enshitified… so that’s that

I didn’t say RN would do better. I said they would be the same.

ehmmm… so did I

but it seemed you portrait that as a better option for some reason

but what “coherent alternative” are the far right parties presenting? I felt that was the part of your sentence that implied some logic in voting far right

so you agree RN would do the same but not even pretending to care and that’s better?

you dropped this /S

It’s not great for the neo-liberal centre who created and perpetuated the economic downturn we’re all in and indicates a failure of the left to present a coherent alternative

Without intending to disagree with this statement, how is voting far-right a better proposition regarding the economy?

I understood this joke… then felt sad because I felt old… then felt mad because I miss my manual cars…

I do not know the details… however, I could handle the cold as I can drive with my winter gear on… but biking seems impossible to me.

Even if we cannot use these in the dead of winter… we usually don’t get to the harsh stuff until mid December and by March is manageable again… with bikes, a normie like myself would have to skip November to May

I think for most people living in the main cities, this could work well … even great a second car for a fam… I just hate that 99% of my choices are big or bigger… and if I want EV I get to pay for the luxury packages I care little about

Agreed… however in countries like mine (Canada) the weather make those useful only half of the year.

PS: no, I am not like those hardcore people who can bike in the winter.

I am still surprised by the “I have never seen this thing (I couldn’t possibly have observed by happenstance) therefore it must not exist” argument been thrown around.

Unless you vacation 10 times a year and love to snoop into other tourist conversations, you are very unlikely to have witness much. Ask people in the service industry and they will tell you.

Also, no I am not saying people traveling to Greece should learn Greek… but they should definitely expect to repeat themselves a bit, maybe use simpler language and definitely not expect perfect American English spoken back to them. This is what I was referring to which is likely represented by a loud MINORITY of Americans that give everyone a bad name.